Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)

by John James

  ‘Not Britain.’ My uncle was almost squirming. ‘There’s Gold in Ireland. That’s what the monopoly was for. Everybody knows there’s Gold in Ireland, whatever else they don’t know about it.’

  I looked so astonished at this that even my uncle noticed it and stopped talking while I got my breath back. I tried to remember what I did know about Ireland, and there wasn’t much anybody knew. It is an island, not much smaller than Britain, and it lies thirty miles, or less, from the coast of Britain. It exports hunting dogs, now, and nothing more. Nothing at all. Certainly not Gold. And I had never met anybody who had ever been there. When I got my breath back, visibly, my uncle went on:

  ‘Of course, any Gold you get from there will have to go through Britain, and it will have to come in legally, as there’ll be too much to hide. There’s no difficulty there. But there’s been no Gold coming from Ireland that I can trace since the conquest of Britain. Even what used to come in was all worked up, and very old-fashioned too.’

  ‘So you mean to re-open the trade with Ireland?’

  ‘Well, I was chatting with Faustinus, and I thought it would be good for the lad.’ He jerked his head at Philebus, who was trying to corner the world supply of Falernian into his own gullet, that being his best idea of a commercial operation. ‘Every boy ought to have a chance to do something when he’s young: it sets the tone to his own life. I had that long trip south of Leptis Magna, that set the tone for me. I’ve been thirsty all my life since, and I’ve passed that on to Philebus. And how long was it … three years … four … you were away up on the Amber Coast? I know it made me, and look what it did for you.’

  ‘Yes, look what it did for me,’ I agreed, as he passed me the wine jar in a hurry while there was still some left. ‘It turned my hair white in a night, and it took years for it to come back black again. And it gouged my eye out, and nothing will ever bring that back.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said my uncle, growing a little pompous as the wine jar emptied, ‘you will not deny that it gave you a certain confidence in your manner, a certain élan in your dealing with the world …’

  ‘If you mean that I seem to think that the worst has happened to me, then I agree: I think it has. No calamity I precipitate on myself from now on can be as catastrophic as those I have gone through already …’

  ‘Not merely that. Surely you admit that you learned a great deal from what you experienced?’

  ‘Well, yes. I admit, I did marry two queens, and seduce one, and that taught me to be very wary about Barbarian women. I’ll never bother with another one as long as I live. I did reorganise a trading firm, and I sent half Germany money-mad. I made one king and I killed another, and that has taught me to be sceptical about the basis of authority. I led an army in battle, and won, and I made up at least four hundred songs about it that you may hear in any barracks in the Empire where there are German auxiliary cavalry. That taught me to be very wary of what the poets tell us. But on the whole, I think the effect was on the North, and not on me: I remained a Greek, nothing more, nothing less. You think it would have done Philebus some good?’

  ‘Well, I did. I don’t think so now. He could never stand the pace, you can see that. Here we are, only two hours at table, and he’s out to the vomitorium already. Look what he’s got to do now. He’s got to get the Deed of Monopoly back first, and that’s only the beginning. Someone will have to go to Ireland, and set up a system for getting the Gold over that we can leave an agent to work. The man we’ve got in Londinium now, for instance, he can do all that, once it’s started, but as for the spadework – why, Leo Rufus couldn’t organise an orgy in a wholesale slave warehouse. Someone responsible will have to go there.’

  ‘But when you go,’ I warned my uncle, ‘you will have to leave someone just as responsible here in Rome. I wouldn’t like to think of Philebus in charge.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not going. I thought you might.’

  I looked at him as bleakly as I could.

  ‘I’ve done enough travelling up there. I’ve got a bigamous wife among the Picts, waiting for a chance to eat me the first step I take outside the Empire. And I’ve a real wife at home in the Old City, and a baby coming in the autumn.’

  ‘You’ll be back home by then.’ My uncle was a good salesman.

  ‘Well, I suppose … I might as well have a last fling while I have the chance.’

  ‘You’ve had four last flings to my certain knowledge. This will have to be the very last.’

  He blinked at me in a benign way, the look he used when he was selling winded horses as racers. Philebus came back, his face the colour of the sea on a dull day. I asked him:

  ‘Do you feel like going to Faustinus and asking him to cancel that deed and to issue another one?’

  The green of his cheeks turned a little paler. He shook his head miserably.

  ‘All right,’ I told him, trying to sound kind. ‘You can take the ship back instead of me. Have you been to sea before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then there’s no way to learn like being in command. The mate is a Galatian, and he’s a good sailor, remember that. The supercargo knows what’s what, he’ll see you through. Then you can tell my father what’s happened.’

  ‘Oh no! I couldn’t face him.’

  ‘It’s him or Faustinus, take your choice. When you’ve done your sea time, then perhaps we can let you loose on land.’

  ‘But what shall I tell him?’

  ‘Anything you like. Say it was a whim of mine, to go back to the North just once more. The whole voyage is fixed up. Troops to Byblos, cedarwood to Alexandria, corn to Corinth and statuary back here. And if you see my wife, smack her on the backside for me and tell her it had better be a boy, this time. Now, about my business. How’s this Gwawl travelling?’

  ‘There’s a draft of Illyrians going up to join the Second Augusta in Isca. He’s going with them as mule-train boss with the baggage as far as Bonnonia.’

  ‘A man who has to work his passage across Gaul and you gamble with him for all the Gold in Ireland? What on earth was he staking against it – don’t answer that! You thought it looked so easy there wasn’t a chance of losing, and he probably put down an embroidered cloak or something. Now, Philebus, just you lose my ship like that, and I’ll gut you alive, I will. And your father will sharpen the knife for me.’ I never gave Philebus time to remember that he was only two years younger than I was. However, he might as well feel he could do something useful. I went on:

  ‘You know Rome, you can help to get me started. First of all, send off a courier to our agents in Londinium and Bonnonia, and in all the towns on the way, to say I’m coming. Don’t say why, just say I’m on my way, and they’re to give me all the credit the family name will bear.

  ‘Next, we’ll have a night out in Rome. I want to see this Gwawl so that I recognise him in future, and so that he won’t recognise me.

  ‘Last of all, I want a litter and carriers arranged all the way from here to Bonnonia, starting, let’s say, next Wednesday, and a bunch of reliable men as escort.’

  ‘Wednesday? But he’ll have two days’ start then. You’ll never catch him before he gets into the Province!’

  ‘I don’t want to. If you fancy tackling the baggage-master of a legionary draft when the troops are all around him, go ahead. Let him keep the Deed safe. If I can get to Bonnonia before him, I can catch him at sea – alone. Besides, I can have a few days in Lutetia on the way. People keep on telling me about the girls there. And that reminds me …’ a sudden thought had struck me. ‘There’s another last thing you can do. I want you, Philebus, to go and buy me a girl for the journey, as a parting gift. I bet you know where to go.’

  ‘He does,’ said Uncle Euthyphro coldly. ‘And he’ll pay out of his own money, not out of the family’s. Will any woman do?’

  ‘Of course not. Listen carefully, Philebus. I want a woman who doesn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, if she’s going to come in the litter with me. For the same reason, sh
e’s got to be clean and decent and not too stupid. And the less Latin she speaks the better. You see, I want a Brit.’

  That would be difficult, I thought. Nobody in their senses will buy a British slave. There are too many magicians in that island: you don’t want to be bewitched overnight and wake up in an ass’s head or something. I went on. ‘She’s got to be miserable and want to go home. If she does what I want, then I’ll set her free in Britain when I get there. So make the bill of sale out to me, and put her age down as thirty-five, whatever it really is, or the manumission won’t be legal.’

  Philebus didn’t object to this. He answered:

  ‘I know the very thing. It’s what Gwawl was wagering against the Monopoly Deed. And whatever he asks, it will be worth it if you can make him pay for what he did for me.’

  Chapter Two

  I had my night out in Rome, and another three after that, before I had my good look at Gwawl in a fashionable bathhouse, not at all the kind of place to expect to see the baggage-master, of a legionary mule train. If I’d been Gwawl, I thought, I’d have been a little more careful about the consistency of my disguises. Myself, I decided, I wasn’t going to bother about any disguises or fancy dress in Britain.

  No, I thought, time and again in those few days, I was going to be just Photinus and nobody else. No more was I going to do anything myself, either. I would have enough agents among the Brits for that. I would just stand aside and plan, and tell the others what to do. And least of all would I have anything more than necessary to do with British women. That was how I had got into trouble in Germany. First I had married a native, and then I had done other things, distilled drink, and organised trade, and even raised an army of my own. No, that personal dealing was over. What others wouldn’t or couldn’t do for me would remain undone.

  My Uncle Euthyphro agreed.

  ‘Just leave it in the hands of the Gods,’ he told me. ‘But what worries me, my boy, is what Gods? I know that the Unconquered Sun dismissed you from his service. Who do you worship now? The Moon and Stars?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, quietly, because it wasn’t something I liked discussing. ‘As far as I worship anything, I worship the Gods Below. Wherever you go, you find different Gods for this and that. But the Gods Below are the same everywhere.’

  By dawn on that Wednesday morning I was glad enough to settle into the nice comfortable litter, and jog off with the curtains drawn against the sun. I hadn’t been to bed on Tuesday night at all, and so I was glad of five hours’ sleep. We moved at a steady trot, most soothing, with the litter bearers changing every quarter of an hour, so smooth I never noticed it. Our escort came close behind. Big hard men, they were, mule-drivers for the family most of the year, freedmen or freedmen’s sons, and their leader was a nasty customer called Marco with a scar from eye to throat. I was glad he was on my side.

  When I woke up, I had a good look at the girl Philebus had bought from Gwawl for me. She wasn’t very young, she must have been eighteen at least, but she was small built and plump, nearly down to the limit I’d set, though she got fatter as we went. She couldn’t have been anything but British with that dark brown hair, nearly black, and those blue eyes, not ice blue like the Germans so often have, but the blue of woodsmoke, soft, lazy but with the fire behind it all the time. She reminded me of my first bigamous wife, Bithig, who had been a queen among the Picts, and who was probably still looking for me. To get away from her, I remembered, we had had to steal a ship belonging to a crusty old man called Caw, whom we sold to Starkadder Eightarms the Pirate. Still I thought, I’ll be quite safe, I won’t be going within a hundred miles of the Wall.

  I looked at the girl in my litter, who didn’t really look like Bithig on closer inspection, and asked her what her name was.

  ‘They call me Candida around here.’

  ‘But your real name?’

  ‘Cicva.’

  ‘All right, Cicva. After this morning, we speak not one word of Latin together. Then, if when we land in Britain we find I can pass for a Brit, I shall set you free.’

  She didn’t like the word Brit, I could see it in her face: they none of them do. To outsiders they call themselves Britons, in full, but to themselves they call themselves Comrades, Cymry. But Brit is the old Army word and I used it when I wanted to. I was paying, wasn’t I?

  The best way to learn a language is in bed. That was the way I learnt German. I learnt the language of the Brits in a litter, which was almost as good, if not better. We watched the long coast swing by, and I learnt the words for sea and ship and for all the fishes and shell-fish. We turned away from the sea, and I learnt the words for ox and plough and for all the plants that grew.

  We turned north at Marseilles and up the Rhone. Coming south, it’s much faster and more comfortable to take a boat, but not going north. This is a surprising thing. I saw a map once, hanging on a wall in Alexandria, and it showed quite clearly that Rome is in the centre of the world, and that Africa is at the top, and that Britain and the Land of Norroway are at the bottom, and that is why the greatest rivers of the world, the Nile and Rhine, flow downhill to the north. So going north ought to have been easier than it was, but if the Rhone flows in the face of nature, then perhaps the road does the same thing.

  A little way before Lugdunum we caught up with the legionary draft. Of course they got off the road to let us through. It’s wonderful what a show of money will do when you’re travelling. I walked by the litter with Marco, and Cicva peeped out through the curtains. I pointed Gwawl out to them. Marco asked:

  ‘Shall we kill him tonight?’

  ‘No, no! I want him alive as far as Bonnonia. He’s got something I want, and we’ll let him worry about looking after it. We’ll pass them and have a few days in Lutetia.’

  I got back into the litter. I asked Cicva:

  ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘Of course. Why can’t we kill him tonight? We could take all night over it.’

  ‘You sound as if you want to kill him personally.’

  ‘I do. If it weren’t for him I wouldn’t have been kidnapped and sold down here.’ She wouldn’t tell me anything more about it. She wouldn’t say what part of the island she came from, or who her people were. This was unusual. Most of these girls are only too eager to assure you that they would be princesses if only they had their rights. But she wouldn’t say a thing.

  We stopped a little way further up, to have a midday snack at a tavern, and the handful of officers going up with the draft, and riding ahead of it to keep out of the dust, stopped there as well. I called them over to join us. We had various mutual acquaintances. I asked after Aristarchos the son of Demons. Last I heard of him, I told them, he’d been commanding a regiment of cavalry at Carnuntum.

  ‘All Brits they were, too,’ I remembered. ‘What were they called? Hadrian’s Own Danube Rangers?’

  ‘Oh, the Wall-eyed Warriors,’ said one of the centurions. The legions are always glad to make fun of the cavalry. ‘But he’s left those now. I don’t know where, but I think it was a promotion.’

  They asked after Philebus – I hadn’t realised he was such a rake.

  ‘He’s well at sea by now,’ I told them, and they all laughed again – they could afford to, I was paying for the wine.

  ‘Better to travel like you with all home comforts,’ someone said waving at Cicva, who had brought us some cheese she had been bargaining for in the village. Like all the Brits she was a connoisseur of cheese, and Gaulish was near enough to British, as even I could tell by now, to let her hold her own in the market.

  ‘I’ve got to have someone to watch my blind side,’ I told them – I had a quite tasteful false eye in that day, of jet, carved in concentric circles – and the officers hooted with laughter and tried to pinch her bottom without my seeing it, and they were in great good humour when the mule train came swinging up the road and Cicva ran off to hide her blushes in the kitchen.

  I pointed to Gwawl. I said:

  ‘Now there’s a
real old-fashioned mule-driver for you. Where did you find him?’

  ‘Oh, that one,’ they all said at once. ‘He’s a bad one, he is. Even his own family wouldn’t own him, wherever they are. A Brit, you know, and one of the nastier ones. Good little fellows, but every now and again you find one like him. Usually, though, they have red hair. You’ve got to watch out for the red-haired ones.’

  I looked again at Gwawl. His hair was black, and tight curled, and it bristled on his thick forearms, with the sinews knotted and corded under the skin. When I had seen him in the baths, I had only thought him gross, the kind of man who sits down in a tavern and then picks up his belly in his hands and puts it on the table. But now he had fined down with the long march, and he just looked big. He was as tall as I am, but he weighed at least half as much again, I’m sure. I looked down at myself, and I took the hint.

  After that, I used to get out of the litter for a part of each day and walk with Marco, much to the relief of the bearers. By the time we got to Lutetia I could walk the whole twelve hours of daylight, and that in the early summer, with my bag over my shoulder, and never want to stop once for a rest. We passed beneath the ruined walls of Alesia, that great fortress of the Gauls. Caesar had tumbled the ramparts and hacked the gates from their hinges. And the Lord of Alesia, that great king, who might have reigned as Emperor over all the Gauls of the world from Britain to Galatia, great Vercingetorix, long dead now, dead and thrown into the sewer. But there was no weeping, even for Cicva, over that old dream, no singing that old song again. There was no stopping till we reached Lutetia.

  We had a few splendid days in Lutetia. We quartered ourselves on the family’s agent, a man called Julius Macrinus, who had a very pleasant house on the south side of the island, looking on to the river. It was a really delightful time, and even today I occasionally meet people who remember it. The girls … the drink … the food … surprising when you consider the reputation the place has for being a sad and strict town. There’s no culture in Lutetia to speak of, no art or anything else to turn an honest penny over, which may be one reason why it’s getting so prosperous.